Canter Bridge

Wisdom is no pauper.

To the contrary, the proverbialist portrays this elegant lady as possessed of—indeed of having built—a very fine house. Her table is laden with the weight of good stuff. Wisdom is no party animal. Neither is she a prude.

Rather, her home is the place of banqueting and wine. Twice the text before us mentions the wine she mixes. Her dinners are no stilted or parsimonious affairs:

Wisdom has built her house,
she has hewn her seven pillars.
She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine,
she has also set her table.
She has sent out her servant girls, she calls
from the highest places in the town,
‘You that are simple, turn in here!’
To those without sense she says,
‘Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.’

It’s a good thing that Wisdom has her table, else we might cave before the temptation to define her character by mere opposition to the half-inebriated effrontery of Folly.

Wisdom is badly defined by mere negatives. That is the stuff of shallow religiosity and constrictive piety. In his time, Jesus would make short shrift of it and find himself labeled a drunken party-goer who hung with the wrong kind of people. Perhaps he enjoyed that.

Or perhaps not. It might have knawed at Jesus as it would have irritated this writer of proverbs to see such a beautiful thing as wisdom tarnished by small imaginations. Not for her the arid and gossipy colloquys of the so-called sages.

Rather, Wisdom invites those whom she calls—and she sends her servants into the streets to find them out—to the richest fare, the headiest wine, the most memorable and engaging conversation, to laughter that elevates both its subjects and its object with none of sarcasm’s bitter dregs at the bottom.

They leave, one presumes, inclined to look back on that evening as a taste of paradise. They recall it with a particular look in their eye. Now they know.